Un soufi réformiste, le shaykh Muhammad Hasanayn Makhlûf (1861-1936)

• Main Author: Rachida Chih
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Provence 2002-04-01
• Series: Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/232

During a period when the struggle against Sufi brotherhoods and, later on, against Sufis themselves became the focus of Muslim reformists, Muhammad Hasanayn Makhlûf (d. 1936) published an anti-Wahhabi work in Cairo in 1924-25 with the purpose of defending the intercession of prophets and saints. Trained at al-Azhar, Makhlûf was, himself, both a reformist and a Sufi affiliated with the Khalwatiyya brotherhood. His double adherence, as a mystic as well as an Azhari graduate, provoked a concern to render Sufism acceptable in the eyes of the newly educated in society, by conforming it with reformist ideas but, at the same time, preserving its fundamental doctrinal principles. This led him, therefore, to attack « innovations » that had made their way into popular religious practices in the brotherhoods, yet, he defended practices concerned with saints that were nonetheless violently attacked by reformists of all sorts.